Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)

Does anyone here want to work with me on electronics projects? Maybe you've seen the surround mixer I built, or the microphone I'm designing? Well, I want a partner in crime.

If you know your way around a circuit board, and you want to create stuff together, for fun and possibly profit, ping me!

It would be majorly beneficial if you're online around 16.00 - 21.00 UTC on weekdays and 06:00 - 21:00 UTC on weekends, since the comotivation aspect is just as important as sharing the workload.

I currently have 33 tabs open in Vivaldi. This would be absolutely impossible to manage without vertical tabs. It would also have been impossible to do this on any regular desktop computer as recently as 10 years ago.

Nescafe products have a particular flavour profile no matter which one you buy, almost like a sort of aromatic signature or trademark.

@clacke Bioengineering would be the proper analog to programming. Medicine is more like system administration. The system already exists and the goal is to maintain a long uptime by preventing or fixing problems. Surgery is perhaps analogous to repairing or patching said system.

@clacke The best way of detecting many medical issues early is to perform regular CAT or MRI scans on people, for example, but this would be prohibitively expensive and would overload the hospitals. So, you're left with visual/manual inspection, intuition and blood tests as the main diagnostic tools, and they're often insufficient.

@clacke I mean, how often have you ignored a problem in a computer system because it didn't cause much trouble, only to later discover that the problem was serious and urgent? Happens all the time. Why? Because performing the detailed checks and tests necessary to pick up on such things early is too much of a hassle. In a professional setting, hassle equals expense, and the same is true of medicine.

@clacke I mean, there are many cases where a doctor won't know a thing for sure and make decisions based on prior experience and gut feeling. They may see symptoms in a patient but are reluctant to run further tests, because his experience tells him that 99 times out of 100, it's nothing... From the patient's perspective, this is unsettling, and can also be lethal, if you actually are that 1 in 100 patient.

@clacke It of course depends on what version of computing you look at. There's the code monkey version where everything's gut feelings and trial and error, and then there's computer science (informatikk) which is more of an academic discipline. I suspect the same thing exists in medicine. You just sort of expect there to be less tolerance for that sort of thing in medicine, since human lives are involved, but maybe not.

@clacke Doctors, especially surgeons, are very strange people. They're there to treat patients, but they're often strangely cold people. As my dad says, though, you can't be emotional when your job is to cut people with a knife...

@clacke Another thing that worried me was to sit in the waiting room of the hospital and come across a brochure for some very dubious nutritional supplements, complete with a 60 day money-back guarantee. A waiting room for the intensive care ward, where people are at their most vulnerable. It actually pissed me off to see it there. Is that how careless they are with what they show to hospital visitors? Doesn't incite great confidence in their powers of judgement.

@clacke What always gets me is how strong the disagreements between doctors in different countries can be. In the computer industry, practices don't vary much, because computers are computers. Humans are supposedly also more or less the same wherever in the world you are, yet clinical practices vary according to local beliefs and traditions. This is somewhat worrying.

To take a ridiculous example of how little they tell the next of kin: They told us they'd move my mother to a facility up north in the days ahead, but couldn't say when, because they needed to wait for air transport first. Fine. However, they then went ahead and transported her yesterday without notifying us. We only learned it a day later when dad called them. To me, it seems like madness that the next of kin doesn't even know where the patient is.

There seems to be a strong attitude embedded in the system that nothing must come between the doctor and the patient. This sounds like a positive statement, but what it actually means is that doctors don't feel obligated to give information to the next of kin, because they take that as "getting between" them and the patient. The only sense in which that is true is in terms of time slots. I don't have a right to interfere anyway. All I want is information.

What nurses can tell you is what they've seen and heard, and details pertaining to the day-to-day care of the patient, for example blood pressure and medications. What they can't tell you is anything about medical procedures, anatomy or prognoses, which is exactly the sort of information you want as the next of kin. You want to talk to the doctor, basically. I had perhaps expected more out of nurses in 2019, but they're not more competent than their 1950s counterparts in the ways that matter.

I don't know what the situation is in other countries, but in Norway, hospitals really don't give a shit about the next of kin.

They have this very neatly divided system where the nurses carry out all the direct care and deal with the next of kin, and the next of kin must leave the room when it's time for the doctor to see the patient.

What I have learned about nurses in the past couple of weeks is that they don't really know anything, despite their college education.

noagendasocial.com is apparently weird about security. I mean, shutting down for several days due to wait for an obscure OS vulnerability to get patched upstream? I did not expect that. The rest of the Fediverse didn't shut down for it, so I don't get it at all. It was my primary instance and I only really maintain one Fediverse account at any given time.

@adam: Can you shed some light on the thinking behind this when the instance is back up again?

This is a pretty good emoji: 🤔

The DOM viewed as a GUI toolkit might be large and ugly, but on the other hand, it's extremely feature complete. There is very little you can't do with it. It sets the reference for everything else. All things considered, it's also quite easy to use. It doesn't take many lines of code to make it do something. The same can't be said of most native GUI tool kits.

I also wish federation for threads wasn't so broken. If I reply to a post on this network, only instances that already track my account can see that reply.